Comment by tacker2000

10 months ago

I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there? Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.

They appear to be launching each settings screen as a separate app and retaining it until Settings is quit. How many resources this requires, or how much this contributes to the lag, I don't know, but...

Open Activity Monitor, and type in System Settings into the search. Then open the Settings app and press the down arrow key through all of the menus. You'll notice that each one of them appears as their own line item in Activity Monitor until you quit Settings, and if you keep going up and down through the menus, it'll (probably) get slower and slower; it seems like there's a memory leak or something going on there, and my hunch is that each old settings menu was thinly wrapped in a SwiftUI view and gets launched as soon as you click its nav item.

  • That’s not too different than the old app, but instead of .app bundles, the UIs and stuff were bundled in .prefPane bundles.

  • Yea some other commenter mentioned that they most likely re-wrote the whole thing Swift.

    So is Swift just too crappy for this kind of UI, that accesses low level system stuff? or are the devs just incompetent? Who knows…

    • SwiftUI is not swift. It's about framework not language. But even that doesn't matter

      I think Apple has decent QA for low level stuff (remember how they quietly converted every iphone to APFS and back just to test that it will work later) but bad QA for final GUI.

      Most of cocoa/objc stuff was written long ago and back when QA was better. If this was cocoa and objective c today it would be equally buggy.

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